about my work
I'm a painter and sculptor working at the intersection of memory, material, and the living world. My practice is rooted in a direct, sustained dialogue with the natural environment, enriched by four decades of experience as a professional backcountry guide.
At the center of this work is an intimate reflection on being a human animal: small within the enormity of things, and yet inescapably part of them. The vast processes of nature humble and orient me. My work tries to hold that scale lightly, finding within it something immediate and beyond time.
The paintings bloom in washes of translucent color, knotted textural lines, and dark, amorphic figures speaking to the sensations and memories embedded in the experience of belonging to a shared world. Sculptures comprised of everyday objects, cast-off building and landscape materials, and the ephemera of contemporary life — found and collected — are assembled into graceful, dynamic configurations that examine the correlations between natural and human-made things.
Ultimately, my practice is one of endless curiosity — an ongoing attempt to pay attention, to look carefully, to stay present, to make work that addresses the charged and uneasy relationship between the natural world and human presence.
“Abstraction is the form fitting the mess of experience and the weight of memories”
Robert Motherwell
Charles Kurre is a multi-discipline artist based in the Desert Southwest; He is an Arizona Commission on the Arts (ACA) Project Grant recipient curating an exhibition for the ACA Traveling Exhibition Program. The ACA exhibition, Language/Image/Object, explored the influence of language on visual expression. Kurre's work appeared in New American Paintings, featured in Phoenix Home & Garden Magazine and reviewed by Art News, Art & Antiques, Dialogue, and New Art Examiner magazines. Additionally, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Reader newspapers have reviewed his solo Chicago exhibitions.
Alongside his creative practice, Kurre is an accomplished outdoors person and self-taught naturalist who guided professionally in the Grand Canyon, and Zion National Parks. Kurre worked with at-risk youth in wilderness programs in the Southwest, managed fundraising efforts for an alternative transportation non-profit, and directed a Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter's volunteer initiative program on sustainable growth practices focused on environmental protections. He is an avid gardener specializing in plant species native to the desert southwest.
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